Ready to "Get Dirty"

Thursday

Oct 11, 2012 at 10:27 AMOct 11, 2012 at 10:54 AM

Deep in the Scott River canyon in the chilly shadow of the Marble Mountains Wilderness, more than 50 people gathered yesterday morning to learn the often dirty and challenging business of salmon spawning ground surveys.

John Bowman

Deep in the Scott River canyon in the chilly shadow of the Marble Mountains Wilderness, more than 50 people gathered yesterday morning to learn the often dirty and challenging business of salmon spawning ground surveys.

Every fall, representatives of natural resource agencies, Native American tribes, volunteer groups, nonprofit organizations and high school students participate in a widespread cooperative effort to gather the data needed to monitor Klamath River salmon population trends and to make management decisions for those populations. And each fall that effort begins with the annual training hosted by the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) with the assistance of many other cooperating groups.

After the data is collected in the field it is analyzed by fisheries professionals and used by agencies to set fishing regulations and harvest allocations, among many other uses.

Yesterday students from Yreka and Etna high schools shivered and learned along side employees of CDFG, the Klamath National Forest (KNF), Siskiyou Resource Conservation District (RCD), the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation (QVIR), the Northern California Resource Center and volunteers from the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project (WSP).

Biologists and scientific technicians from CDFG, KNF and NCRC taught trainees the necessary skills for everything from whitewater safety and field preparation to biological tissue sampling and data recording.

“Ok, so what you are looking for here is the brain,” CDFG Environmental Scientist Morgan Knechtle told a group of Etna High School students as he sawed into the slimey head of a Chinook salmon carcass with a pocket knife. He was demonstrating the proper technique for extracting the otolith bones which rest on either side of the brain and contain vast amounts of information about each salmon’s individual life history. In addition to the otoliths, surveyors also collect scale and tissue samples from a subset of carcasses.

At another training station, Sue Maurer with NCRC – while surrounded by an array of waders, boots and other field equipment – was pointing at a diagram of a flowing river as she explained different hydrologic features and the dangers they can present when navigating the slippery, rocky terrain of a river bed.

“Eddy is your friend,” Maurer told a handful of WSP volunteers, explaining that when a surveyor loses his/her footing and gets caught in the current of a flowing river, the swirling eddies on the downstream side of large boulders can be a life saving velocity refuge.

Trainees also learned how to identify the nests (redds) where salmon lay their eggs, measure and identify carcasses by sex and species, and complete data sheets and biological sample envelopes.

With nearly record numbers of Chinook salmon predicted to enter the Klamath River and its local tributaries this season, surveyors will have their work cut out for them. Already, over 16,000 Chinook have entered the Shasta River and hundreds of them are schooled-up at the mouth of the Scott River waiting to enter.

Soon, the trainees from yesterday’s event will be wading through local rivers covered in wet neoprene, mud and fish slime, working hard to find every dead and rotting salmon they can in order to gather the data that shapes our understanding of salmon populations in the Klamath River watershed.